I carved some time out and made some progress on my clock. This project used a special woodworking tool:

This is for veneer. Don’t take my iron to do your shirts

Yup, looks like a household iron. The difference? Well, none really, as it is a regular iron you’d use on shirts, but I use to put edge banding on stuff:

The edge is a veneer glued down using a hot iron.

Here’s a view of the edge:

Two pieces of different veneers are connected with a miter cut.

The miter servers two purposes – it looks nicer than a straight cut and it hides mistakes in cutting better.

The edge showing is 3/4 of an inch thick.

The way this works is that you apply PVA glue (yellow carpenter’s glue, or white glue) to the edge of the clock and to the back of the veneer. Then you let both dry overnight. When dry, you lay the veneer on the edge and apply heat with the iron. The heat of the iron reactivates the glue and as it cools you get wood glued to wood. It’s a great way to apply flat veneers to curved surfaces.

Not always easy. What you’re looking at is my second attempt as I screwed up big time the first time. But with a disc sander and more veneer here is a perfect joint.

and that’s the key to woodworking – knowing how to fix your mistakes.

If you need me – I’ll be out making mistakes in the shop,

Andrew

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About Andrew Reynolds

Born in California
Did the school thing studying electronics, computers, release engineering and literary criticism.
I work in the high tech world doing software release engineering
Then I got prostate cancer
Now I am a blogger and work in my wood shop doing scroll saw work and marquetry.

There are a number of glues used for veneer work, but for most small pieces like this, PVA (Polyvinyl acetate) works just fine. This includes a range of glues, white (elmer’s), yellow (carpenter’s or wood glue). Often the only difference between “normal” and “fancy” glue is the packaging. The underlying chemistry is the same.

Your work is really beautiful! You reference covering up mistakes, but I find it hard to believe you could “hide” much. The light and dark alternating patterns is really appealing to me. I’ll look forward to seeing the finished project.